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You Can Keep Expenses Low and Vary the Length for a Successful Podcast

by Media

We know the huge hit that events are taking now. And we encourage everyone to register for next Thursday’s SIPA/AM&P/Connectiv webinar titled Coronavirus and Your Events: How to Make Decisions that Protect Your Business and the Safety of Your Staff, that will include our own Brian Cuthbert from Diversified Communications..

Like any national crisis, audiences are turning more and more to their news sources for information. And within that, publisher podcasts are experiencing serious upticks in listeners. According to a Digiday article this week, since Jan. 22, podcast network Acast reports that there have been 650 episodes which reference “corona” or “covid” in the episode titles. These have been downloaded 16 million times. A number of individual Coronavirus-related podcast episodes have had over 300,000 listens each, including one day (March 5) that had over 875,000 listens.

Here are some tips for starting a podcast:
Fit your schedule to your audience. “People get it wrong if they think they have to pump out a podcast every week,” Riordan said. “You really need to think what your true podcast value is, what the audience is, and whether a [time-limited] series is a better fit.”
Over-explain how to listen. There’s still a gap in podcast awareness and listening, particularly among older audiences—who listen least, but like Facebook, will most likely be jumping more on board. “Podcast creators still need to explain to potential listeners how to find, subscribe to and download their show.”
It doesn’t have to cost a lot. For Stephanie Williford, CEO of EB Medicine, the annual cost of her EMplify is $6,500. She pays the hosts $500 a month, and they handle entire production. “They send us the audio file and we upload it to Blubrry which pushes it out to iTunes and Google Play.” Another SIPA publisher, Spidell, does it all in-house. Editorial creates the content. Audio is recorded in Audacity, and production done in Audition. Then editorial and marketing review a draft.
Podcast length can vary to your audience. EMplify is 20 minutes because Williford believes her audience “has a short attention span and not a lot of time. They seem happy with that.” Spidell’s California Minute is actually 3-5 minutes. President Lynn Freer also said it just feels right for her busy audience, and the numbers—around 700,000 listens and counting and an average of 4,148 per episode—bear that out.
Celebrate your launch. “My biggest recommendation is to have a big bang launch, and I’m not talking about an ad on page 5,” said radio futurologist James Cridland. “I’m talking about ads throughout the day on your website, a strap on your [publication] for the week.”
Look inward for talent. “Firstly, use your brand and your talent,” said Cridland. In listening to some of the SIPA member podcasts, I’m always impressed by the hosts, who are usually staff members. Kathryn Zdan of Spidell comes to mind. Ask your staff, in all areas, who might be interested in hosting. You never know.
Capitalize on your legacy brand. “There’s a temptation to launch a new brand around podcasts, rather than using your legacy brand,” Cridland said. “But if you do that you end up not having any heritage, and more importantly no points of difference from all the other podcasts out there.”
Get some advice on selling ads or sponsorships. Cridland recommends approaching an agency that can provide specialist advice on how to sell a new podcast product to potential advertisers. “People who sell full-page ads in newspapers find it quite difficult to go out and sell audio, so having sales people and teams that understand the specifics of selling this kind of content is absolutely essential.” This might be a question for the SIPA webinar.
Get the word out. “You can leverage it through social media, through newsletters, through making short-form videos,” said Riordan. “And if you’re an independent podcaster who can’t lean on the ‘network’ effect’, you can tap into communities and influencers in your genre.”
Build off of your podcasts. EB Medicine has created “video” podcasts, which most of their competitors are not doing. It’s just slides and text but still represents another communication vehicle. Spidell does a little product marketing now in their podcasts and then follows up with people who open that podcast with an email with more information on that product. “It has generated some revenue for us,” Freer said, “enough to justify the time.”
Check out the recent webinar on podcasts that Freer and Williford did here.
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Virtual Events May Be a Great Answer in These Down-Travel Times

by Media
Half the respondents who have attended a virtual event said they would do so again. But only a third of those who have not attended a virtual event indicated an interest in attending one. So there’s an education component here. But a virtual event remains an attractive option because it helps offset the biggest stressors of attending events—being away and logistics—especially in these troubled times of people traveling less.
Education Week’s Online Summits “are an ideal way for busy educators to access timely information about a range of critical issues in K-12 education easily by using their phones or desktops and integrating their learning directly into their usual workflow,” wrote Matthew Cibellis, director of programming, live & virtual events, for Education Week, in his 2019 SIPAward-winning entry.
“This cross-departmental partnership led by the editorial team’s deep, rich content in a multitude of K-12 areas provides learners meaningful continuing education from experts in the field and practitioners in schools.”
The video-friendly Online Summits take place monthly—in fact, the one in January, titled Getting Reading Right, was probably their most successful. Their fully registered audience was 2,540 with 517 live during the event.
“The livestream ran really smoothly; we saw really awesome retention of viewers,” Cibellis wrote me in an email. “We had around 93 live viewers and that number didn’t fall at all throughout the full half-hour livestream; that’s a first.” A couple days after the event, they had 305 views of the livestream. “Our average on-video time is 11 minutes and 7 seconds, and 59% of attendees watched our livestream. We have 18% watching for 30 minutes, which is frankly, remarkable for any video let alone our online summits.”
Copyrightlaws.com holds free Zoom On Ins—20-minute live video sessions on a popular copyright topic that Lesley Ellen Harris conducts virtually. Testing the market, they put on six of these meetings from Jan. 10-28 and added many new names to their mailing list and eventually some did sign up for paying courses. Copyrightlaws probably can’t continue at that pace—6 in 18 days—but with as many as 250 people signing up for a Zoom On In (on open access and copyright in January), they have found a good formula to build their audience.
“It’s another way for us to get amplified,” said Harris. “Someone on the call will tell one or two colleagues to sign up for the next one.” Harris uses Zoom, so people can see everyone else in the “classroom.” People can also join by audio—if they don’t want to see everyone or be seen. Read more.
Here are three tips for holding virtual events from the Bizzabo blog:
1. Use Slack. One of the few potential drawbacks of virtual events is the lack of community. But Wistia wanted to make sure that their aptly named CouchCon was full of networking opportunities. They accomplished this by creating dedicated Slack channels that event attendees could join, meet their peers, and share resources.
2. Repurpose. Virtual events offer the opportunity to easily repurpose content. Each session can be recorded and streamed to virtual attendees. After the event is over, these sessions can then be used as marketing materials like lead magnets. Gainsight does this with its PulseCheck event. To help build the company’s email list, they offer the recorded sessions for free to new subscribers. After your virtual event has concluded, use the recording as marketing collateral to continue building your business.
Get sponsorships. Just like many live, in-person events, Drip, popular email marketing software, found sponsors for their virtual get-together. Zapier, Twilio, Big Commerce, and more were a part of the festivities. Just because you’re hosting a virtual event doesn’t mean you can’t get sponsors. Not only will sponsorship help financially, but it will also lend your gathering more credibility.
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A Good Data Business ‘Has to Be Self-Sustaining With its Own Revenue Model,’ Young Says

by Media
My colleague Matt Kinsman recently asked Alanna Young, president of Technomic, a provider of primary and secondary market information and advisory services to the food industry—and a division of Connectiv member Winsight—what’s different between running a data business and a media business? She had been Winsight’s chief operating officer and is a veteran of Hanley Wood’s Metrostudy data business
“All content is not the same,” she continued. “How the content is produced and packaged is not the same. The media audience is coming for news, journalism and insights. People who come for data are looking for more context, translation, instruction and actionable insight. The type of people who run content for media and those who run content for data are different and they have different skillsets. For data, you have to be skilled in research methodology and analytics.
“One of lessons we learned early on is, we thought we could just merge Technomic with media from a content perspective. No. It’s not the same—the content is not the same, audiences are not the same, the formatting of information is not the same, but they can be cousins. They can share information back and forth. Data is a great business for media because you can’t beat the content you get from it and the additional intelligence you get from the audience.”
Technomic has an online platform called Ignite where the data is syndicated and that includes many of their subscription products. The other part of the business is a smaller, custom consulting business called Advisory.
There are several products within Ignite, Young said.
1. Ignite Company offers profiles of restaurant operators that include contact information, revenue and sales data. That shows what type of business they are. This serves anyone interested in selling to those operators or trying to understand the marketplace.
2. Ignite Consumer offers insight on what consumers think about various restaurant operations. If you have a fast food chain, we survey a consumer panel that provides a look into what they think about your chain, which can include data points such as cleanliness and perceived value.
3. Ignite Menu is their most data-heavy product—they collect thousands of menus and identify things like ingredients and emerging flavors. With something like Siracha, they were able to predict the rise in its popularity before it became mainstream.
“If you are trying to sell into an operator, you would want to come armed with information about who they are and how your products and services can help them,” Young said. “On the flip side, if you are an operator, you want to know who your customers are, what they are thinking and where else they shop.”
The business model for Ignite depends on who they are selling it to. “A traditional manufacturer might have interest in all three main components—Company, Consumer and Menu,” Young said. “It can be sold in components—some buy all of it, some buy parts of it. It’s a corporate license and we don’t charge by the seat.
“The subscription comes with an account management team that offers a variety of support. Some customers have in-house analytics teams who can extract the data they want from Ignite and they are off to the races with just a subscription. Other customers are looking for more support, so we have an accounts team that offer a variety of services up to a very sophisticated custom market sizing study through our Advisory group. It depends on the complexity of what the customer is trying to figure out.”
Products range from a la carte reports that start at $5,000 and can scale to more than $20,000. Compilations of services can run in the six figures. You can also buy profiles of the top 500 restaurants or the top 1,500 restaurants and the price will scale accordingly.
Thanks again to Matt Kinsman for conducting this interview.

 

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“When you start thinking about a data business, you can’t think of it as a content machine to power your media business,” Young said. “It’s its own business and it requires the type of commitment you would have for any new business. To get value out of a data business, it has to be self-sustaining with its own revenue model. Then you have to figure out how to pull content out of it without cannibalizing the benefit of the data subscription. The model has to be such that you are making enough money on the data business that it can support itself with the byproduct that it helps generate better content for the media business.

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Sorting Your Events Now and Finding ‘Complements’ for the Future

by Media
We’ve all seen the obvious hits that events are starting to take. Tom Hagy of HB Litigation Conferences wrote a thoughtful response on the Discussion Forum this morning why he “backed off the event business last year.”
“It’s too vulnerable. Vulnerable to everything from weather to calamity to greedy employees and partners who don’t hesitate to take the money and run,” he wrote. “I never intended it to be a standalone operation. It was always a great complement to what else I was doing…”
Of course, that doesn’t help our present situation. But the Discussion Forum is in other ways. There has been a solid strand on cancellation policies. Ed Coburn of Cabot Wealth Network posted a policy that his colleague Linda Vassaly found from Hubspot:
“First things first: the INBOUND team’s foremost goal is to keep you, our future attendees, safe. We’re optimistic that COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) will be contained before INBOUND, but we wouldn’t be event organizers if we weren’t planning for every possibility. This is why we’ve extended our 100% refund date to June 1 to ensure you can buy with confidence. See our help page here, where we’ll be providing continuous updates as things develop.”
Lev Kaye of CredSpark wrote to encourage asking questions of your subscribers and members.
“What’s your personal level of concern about traveling to an event to be held in the month of _______? What are some of the key factors you’d use in deciding whether or not to attend/exhibit on the currently-scheduled date?”
“It takes confidence to ask such questions—there’s always the fear that it will be interpreted as reflecting indecision. But this is a time of complete uncertainty for nearly everyone, and your audience will understand that you’re trying to gather their input to inform your best thinking. And likely they’ll appreciate being asked.”
(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released a new report, “Get Your Mass Gatherings or Large Community Events Ready for Coronavirus.” The guidance is intended for organizers and staff responsible for planning mass gatherings or large events in the U.S. You can read it here.)
In this time of uncertainty, Hagy’s phrase, “great complement to what else I was doing,” stands out. On Tuesday, I wrote about two virtual events that have been far exceeding expectations—Education Week’s Online Summits (which we will hear more about at SIPA 2020) and Copyrightlaws.com’s Zoom On Ins. Even when live events return to form, virtual events can remain a strong complement.
Video streaming is picking up momentum. The Interactive Advertising Bureau is recommending that presenters for their late-April, yet un-cancelled NewFront event stream their presentations instead of hosting in-person gatherings.
“To be clear, based on feedback from longtime NewFronts participants, we at IAB strongly recommend streaming-only productions for all presenters,” the organization said. “However, we are committed to supporting the industry and believe that the new streaming option we’re outlining here allows for the most flexibility to serve your specific requirements.”
Podcast presenters are also reporting an uptick. CNN recently launched “Coronavirus: Fact vs Fiction” a daily 10-minute show which hit 1 million downloads a week after launch. Digiday had this quote today in an article titled In the Age of Coronavirus, Publishers See a Podcast Mini Boom:
“Both publishers and consumers are going back to trusted long-form sources of information that can be refreshed very quickly,” said Peter Mitchell, group managing director at podcast consultancy 4DC. “News is the biggest genre-growth in podcasts, it’s not surprising that’s where there’s growth.”
They make the point that while advertisers might withdraw from being next to a depressing news topic, “they’re not currently doing that [with podcasts],” said Sam Shetabi, U.K. content director at Acast. In some cases it’s actually the contrary. “In fact, the growing health concerns have seen the number of health-related audio ads go up,” said Scott Simonelli, CEO of audio ad platform Veritonic.
But like the Zoom On Ins, podcast publishers are mostly using the intense scrutiny to build audience, not profits. The upselling comes later.
Much more to come. And SIPA will be with you all the way, right up to SIPA 2020 June 1-3, starting with next Thursday’s important Webinar: Coronavirus and Your Events: How to Make Decisions that Protect Your Business and the Safety of Your Staff. Register here. You will not want to miss this.

LunchByte | Privacy, Edspex, and Interoperablity with Guest Scott Gallant

by Uncategorized

This episode of LunchByte features host – Jill Abbott, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of ETIN as she speaks with Scott Gallant.

Host

Jill Abbott is currently the Senior Vice President and Managing Director of ETIN. Her passion centers on education and helping people reach their maximum potential. With this inspiration and insights gained from a comprehensive background in education reform, personalized learning, assessment, curriculum design, and policy and program development. She is a seasoned executive in education holding local, regional, state, national, and international roles in improving education through transformative practices.

 

Special Guest

Scott has driven EdTech solutions with pragmatic yet innovative design for over 20 years. His attention to interoperable data sharing and governance aids organizations and systems in sound information protection. His consulting organization, Keyed Systems, conducts assessments, training, and offers program management and privacy/security enhancing tools. With past government, school/district, and vendor roles in information technology and privacy, Scott has driven many successful ‘big-data’ initiatives and added significant value to the EdTech space through reporting, teaching, and learning tools. Scott contributes to numerous privacy and technology leadership consortia both nationally and internationally.

 

The LunchByte is the podcast for the Education Division, ETIN, of SIIA This series provides you with access to leaders in the education industry and private enterprise.

Learn from leaders what:

·        The new topics in education are,

·        They are thinking about for the next wave of technology,

·        The greatest trends in sales and marketing involve, and Much more.